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Oskar Luts (1887–1953) seems to per­form the same func­tion in Eston­ian lit­er­a­ture that W.O. Mitchell does for Canada. His sequence of nov­els describ­ing the lives of school chil­dren in the 1890’s, and car­ry­ing their sto­ries for­ward into mid­dle age, are loved in his home­land. These were writ­ten shortly before World War One. All three of the nov­els were filmed: Kevade [Spring] (1969); Suvi [Sum­mer] (1976); Sügis [Fall] (1991). All were directed by Arvo Kru­use­ment, with some of the same actors appear­ing in the lot, notably Aare Laanemets as the ras­cally Joosep Toots. I have all three, but I’ve only found Eng­lish sub­ti­tles for Kevade.

Kevade doesn’t have much plot. Schoolkids pull pranks, tell lies that get them into trou­ble, have puppy love, and get into fights with the kids in the neigh­bour­ing Ger­man parish school. At the time in ques­tion, there was no Esto­nia. The events take place in the Gov­er­norate of Livo­nia [Liivi­maa kuber­mang], a semi-autonomous seg­ment of the Russ­ian Empire still admin­is­tered semi-feudally by its ancient German-speaking nobil­ity. Its ter­ri­tory cov­ered half of what is now Esto­nia and half of what is now Latvia. There was a sep­a­rate Livon­ian lan­guage, related to, but quite dif­fer­ent from Eston­ian, spo­ken in part of the Gorver­norate, which is now essen­tially extinct (there are only 20 flu­ent speak­ers). How­ever, the story of Kevade is set in an area near Tallinn where Eston­ian was spo­ken. The kids are required to learn some Russ­ian in school, and buy things with rubles, but there doesn’t seem to be any sig­nif­i­cant Russ­ian pres­ence or cul­tural influ­ence. The kids read adven­ture sto­ries about Amer­i­can cow­boys and Indi­ans, and the state of Ken­tucky (!) is con­stantly men­tioned. The land­scape looks eerily like East­ern Ontario ― a gen­tly rolling coun­try­side in which farm­land is bro­ken up by sin­u­ous creeks and large patches of mixed for­est. The tree species are sim­i­lar. The coun­try school, farm­houses and 19th cen­tury fix­tures could as eas­ily be in rural Canada of the same era, though the sauna would only be found in North­west­ern Ontario. The fancy Ger­man school, how­ever, looks entirely Euro­pean. The only thing that seems odd is the dom­i­nant hair colour. You don’t usu­ally find a school­room in Canada in which three quar­ters of the stu­dents are plat­inum or flaxen blondes, with a few brunettes thrown in.

The usual Eston­ian tropes appear in the story: a mys­ti­cal aura around trees, and the theme of redemp­tion through music. But mostly, it’s just a set of comic episodes about mis­fired pranks. Valeri Blinov’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy is crisp, sharply focused, and gives the film most of its strength. The young actors are believ­able. One gets the impres­sion that the Estonian-language schools could not hold to the rigid Pruss­ian dis­ci­pline that, no doubt, held sway in the Ger­man schools. The teach­ers are por­trayed sym­pa­thet­i­cally. This is no angry exposé of child­hood mis­ery and adult hypocrisy, though the story does touch slightly on injus­tice and death. It’s more along the lines of Ralph Connor’s Glen­garry School­days, Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier School­mas­ter, or W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen The Wind. This is an hon­ourable tra­di­tion in both lit­er­a­ture and film, and Kruusement’s cin­e­matic treat­ment of the story is a respectable con­tri­bu­tion. It has nos­tal­gia and sen­ti­ment, but it isn’t maudlin.